The Gold Rushes of North America
(1847-1900)

On December 7, 1848, an ornate tea caddy arrived in Washington
after an arduous three-month journey. It was filled, not with
tea, but with gold discovered at John Sutter's sawmill
in California.

The samples were exhibited. Newsmen flocked to cover the story.
President Polk himself publicly confirmed the discovery of "extensive
and valuable" mines which before were only rumored, recommending
that Congress establish a territorial government and a Federal
mint in the mysterious westward realm that the U.S. had recently
taken from Mexico.

As news spread, the California Gold Rush was under way. So
was the eager promotion of a myth.

"Here is El Dorado, of which Ponce de León and
his companions so vividly dreamed," proclaimed the Philadelphia
Sunday Dispatch.

"The Age of Gold" has dawned on earth, Horace Greeley
wrote in the New York Tribune: "Whatever else they may lack,
our children will not be destitute of gold."

Indeed, word of the first gold strikes, reaching the East,
carried poetic imagery befitting the birth of a myth:

"Another bag of gold from the mines and another spasm
in the community. It was brought down by a sailor from Yuba River
and contains 136 ounces. It looks like the yellow scales of the
dolphin passing through his rainbow hues at death."

In the weeks that followed, newspapers freely passed along
reports of "lumps the size of a man's hand" -- "an
inexhaustible supply." Advertisers peddled medicines, money
belts, portable houses, and California Gold Grease, a $10-a-box
concoction which was applied to the body. When the purchaser
rolled down a gold-spangled hill, "gold and nothing else"
would stick to his skin.

In a matter of days thousands of Easterners were organizing
into companies of between a dozen and 150 members to invest in
supplies and transport to carry them-- some along the overland
trails, others by steamship and clipper via Panama -- to America's
real-life El Dorado.

At sermons of departure up and down the Atlantic Coast , ministers
preached cautionary lessons to endangered souls bound for California:
"Will you not bring back with you a restless, morbid desire
for change, excitement and wild adventure? . . . Tell me, rather,
of blasted hopes, of severed ties, of suffering, want, starvation,
vice, death and endless ruin, and declare over this aggregate
of woe whether gold is not purchased at too dear a price!"

Sermons notwithstanding, congregations emptied out. A mass
migration was under way throughout the East.

Tales of adventure and easy riches fired the popular imagination
readily -- it was a time when new and restless ideas were coming
together:

The idea of a frontier to be conquered

The belief in individual betterment

Unprecedented freedom of movement

A chafing at the limitations of the East's Yankee culture.

The discovery of a land of gold in the far reaches of the
American West seemed amazing and yet also quite natural -- the
ancient dream of effortless and staggering wealth had come true,
a just reward for America's already prodigious accomplishments,
and perfect proof of the nation's shining future -- all rolled
together into a grand opportunity for new adventure and further
achievement.

What did the migrants hope to find?

Jim Taylor, a former
slave, went "in hope of redeeming a wife and seven
children" who were still the property of slaveowners in
the South.

James Vann, editor of
a Native American newspaper, asked: "Shall we Cherokee not
take advantage of the times and be found trying to get
to this glorious country?" He organized a gold company and
set out from Oklahoma with fourteen Native Americans, one hundred
whites, and five slaves.

Drawn by "the talk of money in California,"
Margaret Frink started out
from Indiana: "I have heard rumors a woman could get $16
a week for cooking for one man."

"To enrich ourselves, if possible, by every honorable
means" was the common purpose of the Washington City and
California Mining Company organized by J.
Goldsborough Bruff, a father of five and a West Point-trained
architect-draughtsman whose personal goal was to compile the
"perfect guide" to the overland trail. This he
did, chronicling the day-to-day migrant experience in a journal
of encyclopedic proportions.

"I am so enchanted with the wild beauty all about
us . . . It is all new to me, the plants, trees, rock, all strange."
John W. Audubon, a naturalist
like his father John James, was drawn by the chance of a lifetime
-- to observe nature's display in an uncharted environment. "As
we take our horses to a beautiful creek to drink, a curious fish
come to look at their noses."

J. W. Audubon's California destiny was to lead a cholera-depleted
company across grim deserts.

His 200 priceless watercolors and sketches of Mexico and
California were later to vanish in a shipwreck.

Susan Parrish set out
from Iowa with her father, "a wanderer after rainbows most
of his life." The gold mines were "a kind of pot
of gold that we set out to find . . . It was never definite,
but it lay always with alluring promise somewhere in the great
West."

"To reinvigorate my health." Alonzo
Delano, later a well-known humorist, joined the gold
rush on the advice of his physician. Ironically, Delano survived
a cholera-infected steamship... an overland pilgrimage that became
lost after only two weeks on the plains... storms so violent
they were "a kind of terra firma shipwreck"... crossings
"like a battlefield" over raging rivers and around
poisoned wells. Still more ironically, his health improved steadily.
When he stumbled at last into Sacramento Valley, "lost and
bewildered," he could scarcely recognize "men and women
moving about their usual avocations."